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It was another active week on the NFL media rights front as the industry digested Lachlan Murdoch’s bombshell earnings call last Thursday where the Fox CEO said his network would not reengage the NFL in media rights negotiations until closer to the league’s opt-out option following the 2029-30 season.
Murdoch’s proclamation appeared seismic; it’s rare for any of the NFL’s broadcast partners to say something publicly that the league could consider antagonistic. But with a week to reflect on the comments, some are now coming around to the idea that they weren’t actually that bold.
After all, in the normal course of NFL business, media companies engage the league in rights negotiations a couple of years prior to the implementation of those deals anyway. The most recent set of NFL deals, for instance, were agreed to in March 2021 and kicked in for the 2023-24 season. If that same timeline holds for the NFL’s assumed opt-out following 2029-30, meaning new deals would be implemented for 2030-31 (aside from ESPN, whose opt-out hits a year later), it would make sense for media partners to have renewed contracts in place by spring 2028. That’d mean negotiations would almost assuredly take place throughout the 2027 calendar year.
In other words, did Murdoch’s remarks mean all that much?
Reading between the lines, it seems like something the Fox CEO said to placate the markets, who might be punishing Fox for perceived uncertainty regarding its NFL future. Murdoch maintained that Fox and the NFL still had a strong relationship and projected confidence that the two sides could reach a deal during the “customary timetable,” which might be as soon as next year.
CBS Sports president David Berson struck a similar tone with reporters at his network’s annual NFL Media Day earlier this week. While he didn’t outright rule out early negotiations like Murdoch, he also didn’t deny recent reports that CBS’ talks with the league were “on hold” until parent company Paramount figures out its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. Perhaps more importantly, he noted the network was in “constant conversation” with the league and reiterated the strength of the partnership.
Of course, CBS is under a bit more pressure than Fox due to the change-of-control provision triggered by Skydance’s purchase of Paramount last summer. That’s likely reason enough to not close any doors on negotiation timeline. But even the prospect of the NFL actually utilizing that provision is becoming less certain.
Let’s game this out for a minute. If the NFL did choose to shop CBS’ Sunday afternoon package to other media companies, what would that look like? The league probably wouldn’t want to stagger the termination date of that package to differ from when the rest of its inventory becomes available as to maintain the flexibility to retool its broadcast deals in a more holistic way come 2029-30. That means a company would have to be interested in bidding on CBS’ package for a maximum term of only three years. That alone seems unlikely.
Then the league would have to find a partner willing to pay a premium over CBS’ current rate of $2.1 billion annually. Unless Disney and ABC wanted to make a bold play and expand on ESPN’s Monday night package, there aren’t any broadcast networks that would be in the picture. And moving the Sunday afternoon package to streaming seems like a longshot given the political pressure currently on the NFL’s evolving broadcast strategy. Not to mention, it’s still very unclear whether streamers are willing to pay top-dollar for a full NFL package. (Remember, Amazon pays half what the next most-inexpensive package of games runs, a measly $1 billion per year for Thursday Night Football.)
So where does that leave us? Well, all signs seem to be pointing towards the NFL reworking its deals around the 2029-30 timeline as we all imagined would happen before reports last summer first suggested the league wanted to negotiate new deals early. Realistically, that could mean negotiations that begin as soon as next year. But those deals potentially wouldn’t go into effect until the 2030-31 season.
To be sure, it’s premature to rule out early deals entirely. But the winds of change seem to be petering out.
Broadcast networks feel confident the NFL will still want to be in the linear television business a few years from now. Streamers haven’t shown the willingness to pay big bucks. And the NFL likely values having the vast majority of its inventory become available at the same time, rather than going to market with some inventory in a few years, and the rest in the mid-2030s.
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